Memory Is More than Just Remembering: Strategic Control of Encoding, Accessing Memory, and Making Decisions

The goal of this chapter and this volume in general is to provide a beginning sketch of the view that the successes and failures of memory are a reflection of skill in interacting with memory eVectively rather than an expression of inherent qualities or liabilities of memory itself. In this chapter, I review examples of how particular capacities of memory can be conceptualized as interactions between a quite simple memory system and a set of higher‐level control processes that are diverse and varied. In such a theoretical perspective, memory capacities reflect the myriad ways in which learners strategically engage encoding processes and successfully accommodate memory queries to the task at hand, as well as how the products of memory are flexibly aligned, recombined, and operated upon in the service of behavior and action. Much of what we think of as ‘‘memory’’ is thus actually the eYcient action of higher‐level decision making on the inputs to and the outputs from memory stores themselves. This perspective contrasts with current views of memory, which appeal to an ever‐increasing number of distinct memory systems (Schacter & Tulving, 1994) or separable memory processes (Roediger, Weldon, & Challis, 1989). I do not confront those perspectives directly here; nor do I deny levels of explanation (such as neurobiological ones) in which